He had been born about 1160. His family were nobles of the Campagna, whose castles of Anagni and Segni dominated the “Appian Way,” the main Roman road between Rome and Naples. They early chose to make a priest of him. Accordingly he studied first at Rome, then at the Universities of Bologna where was the great law school, and finally at the University of Paris, the centre of theological study, the “queen science” of the Middle Ages. Paris he especially loved, like so many before and after him, and in the years of his power we shall see him make great play with the “French” (that is the North French, as we would say), those unequalled weapons ready to the hand of a thirteenth century pope. In 1190, when he was only 30, his uncle, Pope Clement III, made him cardinal—an example of favour promoting ability faster than it would rise by itself and thereby giving to the able man room for his powers, quite the reverse of the conventional use of favour to bolster up incompetence. Celestine III’s election forced the newly-made cardinal into retirement, for Celestine was of the Orsini family, hereditary enemies to Innocent’s mother’s people, the Scotti. In his retirement he wrote, first on “Despising the World” and the “Miseries of Mankind,” and second on mystic theological symbolism, with such rhetoric and such a jungle of quotations that his withdrawal from the administrative work of the Papal Curia rather increased his fame than lessened it, by giving him opportunity to exercise his pen on these mediæval stock themes. On the very day of Celestine’s death he was elected Pope while still only in deacon’s orders. Within two months after his consecration, already he had two agents in Languedoc to take action against the heretics there.
Certainly the Pope was not interfering in Languedoc because he had nothing better to do. It is true that the Empire was not threatening or even in a position to threaten. That huge, ill-knit mass, stretching from the Rhône to the Oder, from Holstein to the Sicilies, and including both Lille and Vienna, was taking one of its periodical sudden plunges from glittering dreams of world power into civil war and blank anarchy. When Innocent was elected, the terrible Emperor Henry VI was barely three months dead and already his work was in ruins and the Italian cities were busily driving out his German officials whom he had put to rule them. It was not that they had a scrap of anything approaching national Italian feeling; the modern reader needs to have it repeated again and again that the twelfth century had not even the idea of nationality except for the glimmering of it in France. They acted because they disliked Germans as such, and because they preferred to pay municipal salaries and perquisites to someone born and bred among themselves. Like all popes since Hildebrand, Innocent welcomed this sort of thing and aided and abetted them in it. A well-organized Empire which included Italy would have been in a position to put pressure upon popes. In his letters to the cities Innocent even speaks sometimes of “The Interest of all Italy,” but that great phrase died away without contemporary echo.
In Rome itself the imperial prefect swore homage to the Pope without even a protest. The municipality of Rome was a different matter. Even in the tenth century, long before the Papacy had set itself up against the Empire, the turbulent nobles of the Eternal City had several times driven out popes in fear and trembling. The twelfth century communal movement made matters worse from the papal point of view. Even a pope like Innocent could be insulted in the streets by the Roman mob, so that he feared for his life and quitted the place, to return only after nearly a year. From his consecration until the year 1208, when again he brought the citizens to terms by temporarily leaving town, he had on his hands the most explosive sort of political situation in his own city.
Meanwhile his agents (two monks, Rainier and Guy by name) arrived in Languedoc, accredited by papal letters to the “Prelates, Princes, Nobles and People” of Southern France, to begin the papal effort against the Albigenses. At this time there was no idea of using force on a large scale. There was already a precedent in Henry of Clairvaux’s little expedition which had taken Lavaur in 1181. But it seems to have been assumed that this sort of thing was unnecessary, perhaps that it was impossible. At any rate, it was not tried. Rainier and Guy were merely expected to persuade the religious and secular authorities to banish heretics and confiscate their property, the usual laws of the time against heresy. The two commissioners were empowered to compel obedience by interdict, and to reward those who should assist them by granting the customary “indulgences” usually enjoyed by pilgrims to Rome or Compostella.
It should perhaps be explained that interdicts are sentences laid upon localities, and in a place so sentenced there can be no public worship, no bell may ring and no Church service be held. Sometimes marriages cannot be celebrated, even in private, nor extreme unction be given to the sick. In mediæval times they were powerful weapons but at the same time dangerous ones, because they accustomed people to living almost completely shut off from the public practise of religion.
Six months later, the powers given to Rainier were enlarged so that he might reform the Church in the infected regions and restore ecclesiastical discipline. In July, 1199, he was formally designated Papal “Legate,” to be obeyed and respected as if he were the Pope in person. Thus early in the business it was necessary to “reform the lives” of the local clergy clear up to archbishops, as even these last could not be counted upon to lead outwardly pious lives, much less to take action against heresy in defiance of the public opinion of their flocks. But although he had already seen the weakness of the local clergy as instruments against heresy, nevertheless the Pope continued to act on the assumption that the local secular authorities were up to their work in the matter, if only enough clerical pressure of the proper sort could be put upon them.
It seems as if Innocent and his advisers ought to have known enough of the political situation in Languedoc and the universal failure to enforce heretical legislation there to see that this would not do. And yet anyone who has been connected with the central offices of a large corporation, or the general headquarters of a modern army of millions, knows how hard it is, with the best will in the world, to get information on conditions in the field. In this case we may assume it was at first believed at Rome that local action, or at least local secular action, against heresy would be sufficient. Or, per contra, we may assume that such local action was never confidently relied upon, but that it was thought best to try all other means to the utmost before beginning religious war against an infected member of Christendom itself. At any rate, as in all her important decisions, Papal Rome moved slowly.
Moreover, Innocent, over and above his legal training, had a fine sense of fairness and, Italian gentleman that he was, a vast deal of tact. In his dealings with the sporadic cases of heresy that sprang up here and there, weed fashion, outside Languedoc, he followed the papal precedent of curbing and moderating the sometimes excessive zeal of the lower clergy.
In 1199 we find him gentle towards a group of Lorrainers in the diocese of Metz who had come under suspicion for reading translations of the Scriptures and for murmuring against their parish priests. He reproved them indeed for not preferring charges through regular channels to their bishop against the priests complained of. He warns them that the profundity of certain dogmas makes them difficult of comprehension by the laity. Nevertheless he assures them that the desire to understand the Scriptures is worthy, in itself, of praise rather than blame, and makes haste to take upon himself the conduct of the case, apparently because he fears that their bishop may be too strict.
In the same year we find him protecting the “humiliati,” of Verona, a brotherhood who had bound themselves to voluntary poverty. An archpriest of their city had included them in the excommunication pronounced against the Manicheans, Waldensians and Arnoldists (the followers of Arnold of Brescia). Indeed, to judge from bits of heresy trials which have comedown to us, it seems as if mere eccentricity of life was reason enough for suspicion of heresy.